The Overseas Reception of Chinese Science Fiction Works from a Perspective of Western Interpretation Preference——A Case Study of Reader's Reception of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem in the USA

• Published in: Contemporary social sciences (Chengdu)
• Main Authors: Liu Ge, Li Yun
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Editorial Department of Contemporary Social Sciences 01.11.2018
• Subjects: liu cixin; overseas receptions; science fiction novel; the three-body problem
• ISSN: 2096-0212
• DOI: 10.19873/j.cnki.2096-0212.2018.06.007

The Three-Body Problem, written by Liu Cixin, won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, with over 200,000 copies in English already sold. This gure is hundreds of times the average sales volume of Chinese novels in the USA. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses of overseas readers’ comments on The Three-Body Problem posted on the online platforms of Goodreads and Amazon, this paper concludes that the novel’s success overseas lies in its catering to the concerns of overseas readers. The ThreeBody Problem is popular among overseas readership thanks to its re ection on the ultimate existence of mankind, science ction vision & imagination, literary familiarity & identi cation, ideological di erence-triggered cultural curiosity, and a good translation. This paper attempts to interpret Liu Cixin’s work on the map of world literature from the perspective of overseas readers’ preferences to provide references for contemporary Chinese science ction creation and overseas reception.